


Love Among the Ruins

by LilydaleXF



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s06e19 The Unnatural, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-05-30 03:00:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6406066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilydaleXF/pseuds/LilydaleXF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because what the world really needs is another "Unnatural" post-ep story. In this one, Mulder says "love" an awful lot, and Scully makes a promise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love Among the Ruins

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Anjou, who went the extra mile and helped me make this story better.

Scully sits on second base, staring at her suede shoes caked with dirt and irreversibly stained by grass. They were merely dusty before she, Mulder, and the little boy started collecting all the hit balls, but now she has another pair of destroyed shoes courtesy of one of Mulder's crazy schemes. At least this time nobody ended up in intensive care.

After her heels had sunk one too many times into the earth, dreadfully upsetting her balance and slowing her progress, she gave up on ball retrieval and sat down on the nearest approximation of a seat. She watches Mulder and the boy scurry about the outfield for quite some time. She watches Mulder, mostly.

As her eyes track Mulder, she wonders what sparked tonight. It surely wasn't her birthday, despite that being the excuse in his message summoning her to the field. She doesn't linger too long on that question, taking Mulder's earlier offered counsel to heart and just letting the night fly. So she sits, simply enjoying watching Mulder's lithe, purposeful movements around the field.

Eventually Mulder and the boy trot toward the backstop with the last of the balls.

Moments later, out of the corner of her eye she sees the boy tear away on a bike. Then she hears the shuffle of feet approaching her from behind.

Mulder sits down next to her. His arms extend out in front of him, bent and resting on his upturned knees.

"I can't believe I finally made it to second base with you, Scully."

His name gently trails off her tongue, "Mulder…." She shakes her head back and forth ruefully at his joke attempt while saying in a shade above a whisper, "Don't ruin it."

"Ruin what?" he asks, matching her quiet tone.

"This. Tonight. Your thoughtfulness. What you did for me."

"You think I did this for you?"

She gives him the stink eye. "You're ruining it again."

He laughs.

"This was my birthday present, Mulder! You said so yourself. Unless you lied to get me here under false pretenses?"

"You wound me, Scully. I never lie."

Now it's her turn to laugh.

"So this counts as my present?" she asks.

"Yes…"

"…But?"

Mulder's face barely changes expression, but Scully knows enough varieties of his panic face to wonder what's causing one now and making his mind quickly reel. He doesn't pause long before beginning to answer her question.

"You're of course an important part of why all this happened, starting with the Roswell box scores, to the rented field and the hunt for that pitching machine, but I … I did this for me."

She feels her brow furrow as Mulder looks at her intently. "What?" she asks lamely.

"For me. I did this for me."

"So I don't matter? I'm just a 'second base' incidental?"

"Hey now, don't twist things around, Scully." Their back and forth had returned to normal volume, but he returns to shy quiet with, "You matter more than anything."

Her brow remains crunched in confusion. This is not the sort of thing Mulder says, at least not without one or both of them admitted into a hospital or desperately needing to be.

She doesn't know what to say, so she says nothing.

"The thing is, Scully…."

He sighs.

He apparently doesn’t know what to say either, but she can withstand silence better than he can. They sit without speaking for a long moment before he offers, "I love baseball. I love how the game's remained generally unchanged for decades so I can perfectly picture a game from 1947 by reading a box of numbers. I love the feel of a baseball jersey. I love the way every baseball field smells. I love all the statistics. I love how even with the stands empty the field has passion and energy from the fans who sit there. I love the promise of every game."

He looks at her with expectation that she understands, and she looks at him with expectation that he'll explain.

One side of her lip curls up slightly as she puffs out a tiny laugh. They know each other so well and can completely and instantly detail things to each other like the physics of time travel, tactics of the Tibetan numerologists of Appalachia, and branched DNA anomalies, but understanding why he has the two of them at a baseball field? A monumental challenge.

"I get that, Mulder, but I'm not sure I follow you."

They're still looking at each other, but Mulder seems to somehow suddenly look at her more. She almost sways away from him, from his look that's like an intense ray of sun bursting out from behind a cloud, but she does not.

"Scully, I love the things here, I love this place. So you had to be here. I had to show you the game, I had to see you at the field. So you see, I did this for me."

She's blushing madly now. He is too.

"Am I ruining it, Scully?"

"No. No you're not," she says without hesitation as she slips her hand around his bent elbow to rest on his upper arm, linking them together. She soon tips her head to softly lean against his shoulder.

They stay sitting like that for a short while before she says, "Thank you for my present, Mulder."

"You're not mad it was a present to me?"

Even with all his acumen, Scully is reminded that he can still really be a dumbbell sometimes. 

She gently squeezes his arm. "Did I seem to have a good time this evening, Mulder?" 

"Well, you did giggle a lot. You don't giggle much, Scully."

"And do you know why?" she asks, lifting her head to better see him.

"Because you spend almost all your time risking your life, being chased by mutants, getting shot at or shooting someone else, denying the existence of extraterrestrials, thwarting your superiors, straining employer resources, ruining brand new clothes with chemical substances of unknown origin on a near weekly basis, and wrangling your very occasionally reckless ace of a partner out of trouble?"

"Yes, but I meant why I giggled tonight."

"Oh."

"I've never gotten baseball. I still don't really like it." She shrugs in emphasis.

"Scully, you are not making a good case here. At all."

"Shush," she scolds as she lightly shakes his arm back and forth. With his far hand he mimes locking his mouth and throwing away the key.

If only it were always this easy to get Mulder to be quiet. He's endlessly fascinating, and his voice is a dream, but sometimes she doesn't need to listen to a three hour narrated slide show of the history of the Mogollon Monster. She kept interrupting him with disbelieving queries, but still. Last Saturday was not as good as this Saturday.

"I may not like baseball and may not care enough to invest the time to try to understand baseball so I can approach tolerance of it, but Mulder, you? You're different."

He raises his brow at her in lieu of saying again that she's no closer to making him believe that she experienced genuine enjoyment this evening.

"What I mean is, Mulder, I will invest the time for you."

"So you can approach tolerance of me? Thanks a lot, Scully."

So much for the imaginary lock and key system being an effective silencer. And so much for her words being effective. She tries again.

"No, no. Seeing you here so relaxed, so free, so willing to share with me, so frustrating and stupid with your jokes, it was good, Mulder. Very good."

"Oh." 

"I'll probably never understand you, but time trying to is time I want and time I'd never give back."

"Oh." Not quite silence, but she's perhaps stunned him into repetitive one word nothings.

"So you can think you did this for yourself, and maybe you did, but it was for me too, Mulder."

They're not looking at each other anymore, instead gazing out at the outfield and thinking their own private thoughts. She doesn't know what else to say, so she waits until he does.

"You know, Scully, if I'd known I could give myself selfish gifts and have them count as presents for you, you would've received a lot more than two birthday gifts over the years."

"It's never too late to give very late birthday presents." She smiles at him. He smiles back. His grinning agreement is briefly a little worrying to Scully because she lucked out this time, but he may now be imagining selfish gifts of real life ectoplasm or a return evidence-hunting trip to Antarctica.

"But it's too late tonight, Mulder. I need to get home. My mother is expecting me over bright and early tomorrow morning."

She starts to rise, tugging on his arm with her hand that never let it go. He does not protest, which equally relieves and upsets her.

They walk side by side to the parking lot in silence. Scully's car is parked closer to the field's exit gate than Mulder's. As they reach a point where Mulder would need to angle away toward his own car, he starts to raise his hand as if to wave goodbye. Or maybe he's reaching up to smooth his mussed hair.

Taking no chances, Scully grabs his rising arm and in a swift motion moves it over her shoulder as her arms encircle him. She hugs him fiercely. He hugs back equally. She doesn't say anything, and neither does he.

After a good while, they relax their hold on one another at the same time. Scully smiles close to his chest as she thinks that like all those tandem swings of the bat, this is just another demonstration of them being in sync.

As their arms fall to their sides, Scully tips her head up to look at Mulder. She challenges with a sly grin, "You've set a dangerous precedent for presents, Mulder."

"That's on you, Scully," he says rocking jauntily back and forth, heel to toe. "My birthday's next."

"That's what I meant." He stops rocking. She continues, "You better watch out for where I may bring you. I love dissections, watching the Discovery Channel,--"

"Bubble baths."

"--reading medical journals,--"

"Drinking wine."

"--genetic testing, writing field reports,--"

"Stop, Scully, stop. I just remembered I'm never having a birthday again."

"You can't stop time, Mulder. It's a universal invariant."

"Touché."

She smiles broadly and promises, "One day, very early or very late, there will be a birthday present you'll love, Mulder. You wait and see."

His face mirrors hers as he says, "Oh I will, Love. I will."


End file.
